"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now."

Ernest Hemingway ~ A Moveable Feast

​​I think writers write because the absence of words puts us into the excruciating free-fall of an uncreative hour. Without the sublime feeling of words falling from our minds and onto the page, we can go to pieces. Words are our sustenance and without them, we can find ourselves walking in circles and checking to see what’s in the fridge every half hour.

We want to leave something of ourselves behind in our writing; a piece of our soul, our heart, our creativity, our pain. We want to leave it tucked inside a stone wall in Central Park, on a bench near the Brooklyn Bridge, on a seat in the train station, near the still waters of a lake – anywhere books are read. To have our words caught in the hem of a woman's skirt and dragged down Broadway would be such a glorious thing to behold. We want our words to lap up against the shore of a pristine beach where lovers are interrupted by their magic. A kind of literary coitus interruptus.

It’s in that special place where something takes over and the books write themselves that is my favorite. This is where I find my purpose for being here. Even if I don’t know what to say, I can always rely on the words to find their own path and I have to trust them just as a bird must trust his wings.

​And sometimes I think it's not as dramatic as all of that and we simply write because we have no choice. We just gotta write.